Zama

Snapshot

Zama is Lucrecia Martel's fourth feature and her first period film, a loose but faithful adaptation of Antonio Di Benedetto's 1956 novel of the same name. It follows Don Diego de Zama, a criollo magistrate (corregidor) of the Spanish Crown, stranded in a fetid backwater on the Paraguay River in the late eighteenth century, waiting endlessly for a letter of transfer to Buenos Aires or Lérma that never comes. Nothing arrives; everything decays. Over three loosely marked movements the film tracks Zama's slow disintegration from status-anxious functionary to a man who joins a doomed expedition to hunt the possibly mythical bandit Vicuña Porto, losing his money, his standing, and eventually his hands. The film is celebrated as one of the major achievements of twenty-first-century Latin American cinema — a hallucinatory, anti-epic study of colonial waiting, and the capstone (to date) of Martel's slow, exacting body of work. It marked her return after a nine-year absence from features following The Headless Woman (2008).

Industry & production

Zama was a sprawling international co-production, reflecting both the ambition of the project and the difficulty of financing an art film in Argentina at feature scale. Pedro and Agustín Almodóvar's Madrid company El Deseo was a lead partner, alongside Argentina's Rei Cine and Brazil's Bananeira Filmes, with additional support drawn from a long list of co-producers and funds across the Netherlands, Mexico, France, the United States, Portugal, Lebanon, Switzerland, and elsewhere, plus backing from Argentina's INCAA. The multi-country patchwork is characteristic of how a director of Martel's prestige but limited commercial reach assembles a budget.

The production had an unusually long gestation. Martel spent years after The Headless Woman developing other projects — most notably a long-cherished adaptation of Héctor Germán Oesterheld's science-fiction comic El Eternauta, which collapsed — and her return to filmmaking was further complicated by a period of serious illness. Di Benedetto's novel, long considered a difficult, near-unfilmable classic of Argentine literature, had circulated for years as material Martel was drawn to. The shoot itself was logistically demanding, staged in remote riverine locations (in the Argentine northeast and Chaco/Formosa region and in Paraguay) with period costumes, animals, and large casts of Indigenous and non-professional performers. The film premiered in 2017 — screening at the Venice Film Festival and traveling widely on the festival circuit (Toronto, New York) — and was selected as Argentina's submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It was released internationally by arthouse distributors (Strand Releasing handled the United States). It was a critical event rather than a commercial one; precise box-office figures are not something I can reliably cite.

Technology

Zama was shot digitally by cinematographer Rui Poças. The film exploits digital capture's sensitivity in low light and its capacity for dense, saturated color in shaded and interior spaces — the greens, ochres, and rot-browns of the colonial outpost — rather than pursuing the softened grain of celluloid. I won't specify a camera system or exact aspect ratio with confidence, as I don't have that firmly in the record, though the framing reads as a boxy, near-squarish ratio that concentrates figures and crops the landscape into oppressive slabs. The more consequential "technology" of the film is arguably its sound post-production, where anachronistic and processed elements were layered into an ostensibly naturalistic eighteenth-century world (discussed below).

Technique

Cinematography

Poças — the Portuguese cinematographer known for his work with Miguel Gomes (Tabu) and João Pedro Rodrigues — gives Zama a look at odds with the sweep we expect from colonial period drama. The camera stays close, often at or near Zama's shoulder, and the compositions are crowded: bodies, servants, animals, and objects press into frame edges, half-seen, cropped, or crossing behind the protagonist. Martel and Poças deny the establishing shot and the panorama. The river, the fort, the geography of the colony are never mapped; space is disorienting by design, mirroring Zama's own inability to leave or locate himself. Color is deep and slightly diseased — verdant but stagnant — and the light is frequently flat, humid, enclosing. When landscape finally opens up in the final expedition, it arrives as a kind of unreal, over-bright hallucination rather than release.

Editing

Cut by Miguel Schverdfinger (with Karen Harley credited on the edit as well), the film advances by ellipsis and disjunction. Time collapses without markers: years pass between cuts, characters reappear inexplicably, and the three-part structure (the two governors, the expedition) is signaled obliquely rather than announced. The editing withholds cause and effect, so that the viewer, like Zama, loses track of how long the wait has lasted. Scenes end early or begin late; the rhythm is patient but never lulling, punctured by sudden violence or the intrusion of a sound cue.

Mise-en-scène / staging

Staging is Martel's signature strength, and Zama is a master class in the off-center, the peripheral, and the interrupted. Action of importance frequently happens at the edge of the frame or just out of focus while a mundane exchange occupies the center; servants and Indigenous figures move through scenes with an autonomy that decenters the ostensible white protagonist. The blocking is choreographed so that bodies constantly obstruct and reframe one another. Period detail — wigs, powder, uniforms, a dead llama, a fish that the opening dialogue claims the river rejects and pushes back to shore — is deployed as symbol as much as texture. The famous opening image of Zama on the shore, and the recurring motif of a creature the water will not accept, establish the film's governing condition: suspension, refusal, non-arrival.

Sound

Sound is where Zama is most radical, extending the aesthetic Martel developed across the "Salta trilogy." The soundtrack is a dense, near-subliminal weave of insects, animals, water, and off-screen human activity that generates a persistent unease. Most strikingly, Martel layers in anachronistic and processed sounds — including a recurring, warm, almost lounge-like guitar cue drawn from the Brazilian instrumental duo Los Indios Tabajaras — whose easy, romantic tone sits in surreal counterpoint to the colonial squalor onscreen. There are also low, tonal drones that swell beneath scenes, producing dread without conventional scoring. The effect is to detach the image from any stable historical realism and locate the film in a psychological, dreamlike register.

Performance

Daniel Giménez Cacho, the veteran Mexican actor, anchors the film as Zama with a performance of contained, deteriorating dignity — a man perpetually composing his face into official impassivity while the world ignores him. The role is largely reactive and internal; Giménez Cacho conveys Zama's vanity, lust, and mounting panic through minute shifts rather than declamation. Around him, Lola Dueñas plays the flirtatious, unattainable Luciana Piñares de Luenga; Matheus Nachtergaele appears as the bandit Vicuña Porto in the final act; and Juan Minujín and a large ensemble, including many non-professional and Indigenous performers, fill out the colonial world. Martel directs performance toward opacity — faces that withhold, exchanges that misfire — consistent with the film's refusal of psychological legibility.

Narrative & dramatic mode

Zama is an anti-narrative of pure deferral. Its dramatic engine is the absence of event: Zama waits for a transfer, and the plot is the accumulating erosion of that wait. Di Benedetto's novel is structured around this theme of expectation and its slow poison — the epigraph famously dedicates the book "to the victims of expectation" — and Martel preserves the mode rather than manufacturing a conventional arc. The film withholds exposition ruthlessly; motivations, timelines, and relationships must be inferred. Only in its third movement does it acquire the outward shape of a genre story — the expedition into the wilderness to hunt an outlaw — and even that resolves into surreal dismemberment rather than catharsis. The dramatic register is ironic, absurdist, and finally tragic, with Zama's colonial self-importance systematically stripped away until he is a maimed man adrift on the river, asked by a child whether he wants to live.

Genre & cycle

Nominally a historical drama and, in its final third, a wilderness-expedition adventure, Zama is better understood as an entry in a modern art-cinema cycle that dismantles the colonial epic from within. It belongs beside recent, revisionist reckonings with conquest and the colonial encounter in Latin American cinema, and invites comparison with the fever-dream jungle films of Werner Herzog (Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo) — though where Herzog pursued grandiose obsession and physical spectacle, Martel pursues stasis, bureaucracy, and interiority. It is an anti-epic: the genre furniture of the period film is present but hollowed out, its heroism converted into humiliation.

Authorship & method

Zama is unmistakably a Lucrecia Martel film, and its authorship extends through a tight circle of collaborators. Martel wrote the screenplay alone, adapting Di Benedetto, and her method is famous for its emphasis on sound, texture, and the sensory over plot — she has described conceiving films through hearing and bodily sensation as much as image. She works by decentering the frame and refusing the conventional grammar of coverage. Cinematographer Rui Poças was a new and crucial collaborator, replacing the visual language of her earlier films with his own close, saturated style. Editor Miguel Schverdfinger shaped the film's elliptical time. On sound — the true authorial signature — Martel worked with her longtime sound collaborators (Guido Berenblum has been a key figure across her career) to build the layered, anachronistic design; there is no conventional composer, the "score" being assembled largely from found and processed material including the Los Indios Tabajaras cue. The Almodóvar brothers' El Deseo provided the producorial muscle. The result is a work of total, controlling authorship in which every ambient sound and off-center gesture is deliberate.

Movement / national cinema

Martel is the preeminent figure of the Nuevo Cine Argentino (New Argentine Cinema) that emerged in the late 1990s and 2000s, and Zama is that movement's mature, canonical statement in the historical mode. Her earlier "Salta trilogy" — La Ciénaga (2001), The Holy Girl (2004), and The Headless Woman (2008) — established a regional, class-attentive, sensorial cinema rooted in her native northwestern Argentina. Zama both extends and departs from that body: it leaves the contemporary bourgeois household for the colonial eighteenth century, yet retains the trilogy's decentered gaze, class and racial hierarchy as subject, and immersive sound. The film also sits within a broader continental turn toward interrogating conquest and coloniality, and its multinational co-production reflects the transnational reality of contemporary Latin American art cinema.

Era / period

Set in the late eighteenth century in the twilight of the Spanish colonial administration in the Río de la Plata region, Zama dramatizes the bureaucratic machinery of empire at its most stagnant and peripheral. The specificity matters: Zama is a criollo, American-born, and thus structurally subordinate to peninsular Spaniards, forever petitioning a distant Crown that regards him as provincial. The film renders this pre-independence colonial order — its racial castes, its enslaved and Indigenous labor, its petty officialdom — not as costume-drama backdrop but as a lived system of humiliation and dependency, made strange and immediate by the film's sensory and anachronistic devices.

Themes

The film's governing theme is expectation as a form of death — the corrosive effect of waiting for a recognition, a promotion, a return that never arrives. From this flow its deeper concerns: the psychic structure of colonialism, in which the colonizer is himself trapped, alienated, and dependent on the very system that ignores him; identity and displacement, Zama being a man of the Americas denied belonging in either Europe or the land he administers; desire and its frustration, sexual and social, curdling into paranoia; and the body's decay and dissolution, culminating in literal dismemberment. Race, servitude, and the near-silent presence of Indigenous and enslaved people who watch and outlast the colonial officers form a persistent undercurrent, so that the film's real subject is arguably the whole doomed apparatus of empire seen from the vantage of its exhaustion.

Reception, canon & influence

Zama was received as a major work upon its 2017 release and has been rapidly canonized. Critics widely hailed it as one of the finest films of its year and of the decade, praising its formal audacity, its sound design, and Martel's uncompromising refusal of period-film convention; it appeared on numerous best-of-decade lists and consolidated Martel's standing as one of the most important directors working. Any specific award tallies or grosses I would not want to assert beyond the record, but its critical stature is not in doubt; it was Argentina's Oscar submission and a fixture of the year's major festivals.

Influences on the film (backward): The primary source is Antonio Di Benedetto's 1956 novel, itself a landmark of Argentine existential modernism often linked to Camus, Kafka, and Dostoevsky in its portrait of waiting and dread. Cinematically, the film converses with the colonial jungle films of Werner Herzog while inverting their bombast, and it draws on the sensory, elliptical art-cinema lineage (Martel has cited a range of literary and cinematic touchstones over her career, though I won't attribute specific ones to Zama without certainty). Above all it grows organically from Martel's own prior three features.

Legacy (forward): Zama has become a reference point for a generation of filmmakers seeking to dismantle the historical epic and the colonial narrative from within, and a standard citation in discussions of postcolonial and decolonial cinema. Its sound design in particular — the use of anachronism and drone to destabilize period realism — has been influential on subsequent art films that treat the soundtrack as the primary vector of meaning. It cemented Martel's influence on younger directors, especially women and Latin American filmmakers, for whom her decentered, sensorial method offered an alternative to conventional narrative cinema. As Martel's most widely seen and studied film to date, it functions as both the summation of her earlier work and the work through which her method entered the broader canon.